Ron Charles: “We live in a consumer culture. Many feature writers are pressured to produce copy that their readers can ‘use’ — that is, use to buy things. Combine that with a thirst for clicks and views, and you’ve got the potential for abuse. (A freelancer for a women’s magazine told me recently that she’s been instructed to rave about the books she’s assigned, no matter what she really thinks. That’s not book criticism; it’s publicity. And it’s hardly ‘nice’ to the people who really matter: our readers.)”
Author: ArtsJournal2
The End Of Adultery? Sleeping Around Is Sooooo Millennia Ago
“First, not all men are created equal; there are few Ryan Goslings and many Kevin Redmons. The weaker among us quickly learned the futility of direct competition, and turned to ‘alternative reproductive strategies’ to spread our genes. (I may not be a dreamboat, baby, but I’ll bring you coffee in bed.) Second, females make choices.”
Caveat Lector, In An Age Of Real-time ‘Spoilers’ (Of The Olympics And Other Narratives)
“Perhaps we ought to renegotiate the social contracts around spoiling. It used to be that the onus was entirely on the one who might spoil to protect any privileged story information he or she might possess. Now, as stories begin to be told more asynchronously, I think we are beginning to live in a world in which those of us who wait to hear a story must accept that we’re taking on more of a risk of having that story accidentally spoiled. It’s on us, at least somewhat. More so than ever, at the very least. And I also think we can begin to forgive those storytellers who are more geared toward instant delivery of the news.”
Ping Is Apple’s Most Public Big Failure – Because It Didn’t Share Well
“Ping failed because Apple didn’t make it easy enough to share the music users truly care about–rather than simply receipts for the songs they purchased. Others in the space have avoided such stumbles–it’s arguably the reason why Spotify has become so popular and why Google wanted to enable full-song sharing on Google+. ‘We have to make sure that if I want to share a song with you, that you can listen to that song whether or not you’re a Rhapsody subscriber,’ Irwin says.”
Florence Waren, 95, Jewish Dancer Who Outwitted The Nazis While Dancing For Them In Paris
“Waren was a Jew in disguise, performing in a Nazi-held city where Jews lived under constant threat. She was a lawbreaker, hiding other Jews in her apartment, risking her own deportation to a concentration camp. And she was a smuggler, helping to supply guns to the French Resistance. ‘I think she was very scared,’ her son, Mark Waren, said in a telephone interview. ‘But I don’t think it was something she thought much about. It was simply what one did.'”
A Wild Sculpture Goes Viral – And Then Goes Missing
The sculpture in Fredericton, Canada – a creation which scares even the artist – had more than five million views and 600 comments on Reddit before it went missing.
Composer Of Movie Scores Gets The Silver And The Gold
“The new critics poll from the British Film Institute has declared Hitchcock’s Vertigo the best film ever, dislodging Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane after half a century. Film fans may argue about their relative merits but enthusiasts for the music of Bernard Herrmann may not care much either way: he wrote the scores for both.”
Working-Class Scottish Author Won’t Take Any Crap From Bourgie Critics
James Kelman: “Obviously as a writer you have to reflect on why your work is provoking such hostility, because all you want to do is write your stories as best you can. You’re forced to reflect on, why is my work so upsetting for people? The agenda behind it is clear. They don’t want to see these people in literature. These areas of human experience [I write about] should not appear in public; we don’t want to know. We know that people are in the street, that they have no money and are maybe begging, but we don’t want to see them in literature. They should be swept under the carpet.”
Rare Books Discovered In Library Cupboard
“The collection includes a 1538 edition of letters by Roman philosopher Cicero and an 1827 illustrated 
edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost – one of only 50 copies.”
The Drama Of The 8×10 Film Camera
“Alec Soth says: ‘One of the qualities of this camera is that because you are under a dark cloth, [the subjects] don’t see you and they don’t see you looking right into their eyes. … They become less self-concious, in a strange way, than if I’m holding a camera to my face.'”